“This may surprise you, but the embassy move does not challenge Palestinian/Arab/Muslim claims to the city,” wrote Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “What is happening right now is reflective of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict historically: Palestine advocates fighting against Israel rather than for the Palestinian cause.”

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Anti-Zionist groups were quick to pounce Wednesday following President Trump’s proclamation acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

In a statement, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a virulently anti-Israel organization, “unequivocally condemn[ed] President Trump’s announcement that he will begin the process of moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as part of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a move that would make the U.S. the only country in the world to do so.”

In contrast, Russia recognized West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in April, and after Trump’s speech Wednesday, the Czech Republic also said it would recognize West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

But for those who reject Israel’s very existence, Wednesday was a difficult day.

“#Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel no matter how many times Trump says it,” wrote political activist Linda Sarsour, who has argued Zionists can’t be feminists and that “nothing is creepier than Zionism. “He doesn’t speak for me.”

Good thing she cleared that up.

Trump’s proclamation “effectively hands Israel a blank political check for its illegal annexation of Jerusalem and legitimizes Israel’s ongoing displacement and disenfranchisement of the city’s Palestinian residents,” said the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), an organization leading the push for an economic boycott of Israel.

This statement, along with Sarsour’s, ignores the reality that Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since 1949. It is home to its parliament, the Knesset, as well as the prime minister’s residence. The statements also deliberately ignore Trump’s specific caveat that the United States is “not taking a position of any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders. Those questions are up to the parties involved.”

The relocation of the American embassy affects peace talks only if the Palestinians choose to make that so.

Still, American Muslims for Palestine’s (AMP) national policy director Osama Abuirshaid joined a protest outside the White House to express outrage and say that Trump should be held responsible for any resulting violence. “Now our demand is very clear that this administration should inject some common sense, should inject some logic and withdraw this announcement,” he said.

At a news conference Tuesday, Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Executive Director Nihad Awad argued that the decision to move the embassy was due to the disproportionate influence of the “pro-Israel lobby” in Congress.

Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and committing to move the U.S. embassy there is “a reckless move that has put the interest of a foreign power and its domestic lobby above the interests of the United States,” he said. Awad, who publicly expressed support for Hamas in 1994 and was linked to a Muslim Brotherhood-run Hamas-support network, all but called Congress corrupt for the original, bipartisan legislation that makes the move possible.

“It is really the interest of those politicians who voted, and they voted. And they voted against the interest of their own country because of the money, the pressure and the favors that they get from the pro-Israel lobby,” Awad said.

He repeated that message Wednesday standing with Abuirshaid outside the White House.

The Senate voted 90-0 in June to reaffirm “the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (Public Law 104–45) as United States law, and calls upon the President and all United States officials to abide by its provisions.”

As many people have commented this week, no peace proposal has ever contemplated Israel relinquishing Jerusalem as its capital. While some argue the U.S. embassy move should wait for a peace agreement, that strategy has shown no results and ignores the realities of the Israeli government.

“This may surprise you, but the embassy move does not challenge Palestinian/Arab/Muslim claims to the city,” wrote Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “What is happening right now is reflective of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict historically: Palestine advocates fighting against Israel rather than for the Palestinian cause.”

As President Trump said in his speech, “Peace is never beyond the grasp of those willing to reach.”

No sooner had President Trump nominated Kenneth Marcus, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, to be Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, then extremist anti-Israel groups began to mount an aggressive campaign to derail the appointment.

This is a remarkable affront to a civil rights lawyer who has spent his career fighting for the rights of women, the disabled, and members of many minority groups: African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, as well as Sikhs, Arabs, and Muslim Americans. Marcus’s prior tenure at the federal Office for Civil Rights was widely lauded for effective leadership and support for the rights of all students. For this reason, most civil rights groups have thus far refrained from subjecting Marcus to the vituperation that other recent Trump nominees have faced.

Some extremist anti-Israel groups have broken ranks, however, attacking the administration’s Jewish civil rights nominee with reckless and malicious falsehoods.

One of these groups, Palestine Legal, whose mission is to bolster the anti-Israel movement by challenging efforts to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism, immediately issued a letter smearing Mr. Marcus as an “Anti-Palestinian Crusader” and opposing his nomination in terms of the so-called Livingstone Formulation. Under that formulation, as identified by British sociologist David Hirsch, anti-Semites accuse Jews of fabricating anti-Semitism claims in order to silence decent people who are concerned about Israel’s supposed human rights violations.

In this way, Palestine Legal’s director, Dima Khalidi, levels the spurious charge that “Marcus is the architect of a strategy to abuse civil rights law to suppress campus criticism of Israel.” In other words, she contends that Marcus’ campaign to ameliorate campus anti-Semitism is not based on a virtuous desire to end bigotry but is a disingenuous attempt at “shielding Israel from scrutiny,” consistent with the “Livingstone Formulation.”

Part of that notion is “the counteraccusation that the raisers of the issue of anti-Semitism do so with dishonest intent, in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. The allegation is that the accuser chooses to ‘play the anti-Semitism card’ rather than to relate seriously to, or to refute, the criticisms of Israel.”

Of course, those who refuse to acknowledge that their speech or behavior may, in fact, be anti-Semitic normally resist such designations, but the allegation of Palestine Legal against Mr. Marcus is particularly odious because it seeks to impugn his integrity as someone fighting anti-Semitism, suggesting instead that his true motive, carefully hidden from view and masked as benign activism, is actually to serve the interests of Israel by trying to delegitimize and libel its campus critics.

Moreover, Palestine Legal claims, in order to shield Israel from scrutiny, to insulate its policies and state behavior from critique, Mr. Marcus, they say, pretends to be interested in anti-Semitism but is actually creating a smokescreen to shield Israel “at the expense of civil and constitutional rights.”

In addition to the Livingstone Formulation, these groups are also going after Marcus with the classic charge that Jews are attempting to use gain control of government power for nefarious purposes. “Marcus has no business enforcing civil rights laws when he has explicitly used such laws to chill the speech activities and violate the civil rights of Arab, Muslim, Jewish, and other students who advocate for Palestinian rights,” Khalidi charged.

It is not coincidental, of course, that a group dedicated to undermining efforts to fight anti-Semitism would have been aware of the efforts of Mr. Marcus and his colleagues as they attempted to identify the causes and corrosive impact of campus anti-Semitic speech and behavior.

For at least the last decade the primary source of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic activism on campuses has been anti-Israel individuals and groups, including the Muslim Student Association and the radical Students for Justice in Palestine, among others. So, even as Ms. Khalidi would have one believe that Mr. Marcus launched a campaign to silence pro-Palestinian activists merely as a tactical ploy to insulate Israel from critique and condemnation, the anti-Israel activism which she so ardently defends has regularly spawned instances in which agitation against Israel has included speech and behavior which has been considered, and in fact often was, anti-Semitic.

Of great concern to those who have observed the invidious byproduct of this radicalism is the frequent appearance of anti-Israel sentiment that often rises to the level of anti-Semitism, when virulent criticism of Israel bleeds into a darker, more sinister level of hatred—enough to make Jewish students, whether or not they support or care about Israel at all, uncomfortable, unsafe, or hated on their own campuses.

That is precisely the type of “hostile environment,” created by generating hostility toward Jewish students over their perceived or actual support of Israel, that may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the legal tools Mr. Marcus has used and may well continue to use in his new role to help insure that universities take steps to ameliorate situations in which such prejudice-laced campus climates are allowed to develop.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), another anti-Israel group that also, not insignificantly, supports the BDS movement, published an open letter denouncing the choice of Mr. Marcus for the OCR appointment, as well, repeating the spurious charge that the use of Title VI statutes, and such guidelines as the U.S. State Department Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, would have the perverse side effect of suppressing the free speech of “pro-Palestinian” activists.

And despite Palestine Legal’s fear that the conflation of “criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism . . . has really serious consequences for those who advocate for Palestinian human rights and are being condemned and censored and punished as a result of the enormous pressure being placed on universities by the likes of Marcus and dozens of other Israel advocacy groups,” the truth is that not human rights advocates behave in civil ways, and the fact that “pro-Palestinian” activists support a minority group does not justify their misbehavior and extremism, even for what they clearly believe to be a noble cause.

But pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus—the very activism Palestine Legal is so intent on preserving—has been shown to correlate directly to an uptick in anti-Semitic speech and behavior. For example, in two studies it conducted of anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that investigates and documents anti-Semitism at U.S. universities, found that “Schools with instances of student-produced anti-Zionist expression, including BDS promotion, are 7 times more likely to have incidents that targeted Jewish students for harm than schools with no evidence of students’ anti-Zionist expression and the more such anti-Zionist expression, the higher the likelihood of incidents involving anti-Jewish hostility.” This “anti-Zionist expression” and “BDS promotion are,” of course, the central aspects of Palestinian activism.

That is the issue here, and why it is necessary and important that, in the effort to promote the Palestinian cause, another group—Jewish students on American campuses—do not become victims themselves in a struggle for another group’s self-determination.

Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews, is also a member of the board of directors of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law and the AMCHA Initiative.

Almost everyone in a position to do something is a coward. Politicians continue to recite the mantra that “Muslims are today’s Jews,” even though in Europe today Muslims are far more often the tormentors than the tormented, and Jews lead the list of victims of public abuse.

Needless to say, the immigrants Trump wants to keep out of the U.S. are precisely the type who, in Europe, are currently Jew-bashing people like Stephen Miller — and Rob Eshman. But Eshman doesn’t want to think about this ticklish fact, which challenges his own simplistic, self-righteous pontifications.

Linda Sarsour is the very personification of stealth Islamization and an obvious anti-Semite. But as Davidson himself noted, she’s acquired plenty of Jewish allies and defenders, “including Jeremy Ben-Ami, Mark Hetfield, Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Brad Lander.”

For years now, Jews across western Europe have been the targets of harassment by Muslims. Police officers stand guard outside of synagogues. Recently, when I stayed in the Jewish Quarter in Rome, I couldn’t help notice the presence of multiple police kiosks, each manned by an armed cop. Many Jews in European cities have long since ceased wearing yarmulkes or Stars of David. Jewish kids are instructed by their parents to avoid identifying themselves as Jews at school lest they be beaten up by their little Muslim friends.

Meanwhile, almost everyone in a position to do something is a coward. Politicians continue to recite the mantra that “Muslims are today’s Jews,” even though in Europe today Muslims are far more often the tormentors than the tormented, and Jews lead the list of victims of public abuse. Police prefer not to prosecute Muslim perpetrators for fear of being called “Islamophobes.” Teachers don’t want to deal with Muslim bullies in their classes for the same reason.

Yet you would hardly know this to read much of America’s Jewish media. On August 2, the Jewish Journal ran a piece slamming Trump adviser Stephen Miller for dismissing (quite properly) the suggestion by CNN’s Jim Acosta that the new immigration bill favoring English-speakers violated the “spirit” of Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem, “The New Colossus,” and emphasizing, as if it had anything to do with the issue, that Miller himself is the great-grandson of Jewish immigrants. This was not the first time the Jewish Journal had gone after Miller for being a Jew who supports immigration reform. In March, another piece in that publication, headlined (I kid you not) “From Hebrew School to Halls of Power,” noted that Miller was “a principal author of Trump’s draconian immigration measures, including the executive order the president signed in late January targeting immigrants from Muslim-majority countries,” even though “[t]hese politics are generally reviled in the liberal circles of his Jewish upbringing.”

The big hit-job, however, came a year ago, when the editor-in-chief of the Jewish Journal, Rob Eshman, sneered at Miller for the way in which he “froth[ed] the mob” at Trump rallies over immigration. Eshman professed shock at the news that Miller is Jewish. How, he asked, could “this young anti-immigrant leader” be “the descendent of immigrants”? Eshman looked into Miller’s family tree, and discovered that his maternal great-grandfather, seeking to escape persecution by Cossacks, fled Antopol (in present-day Belarus) and settled in Pennsylvania, where he founded a thriving business. And yet, thundered Eshman, Miller dares to serve as “Trump’s anti-immigrant avatar.” Imagine: “The great-grandson of a desperate refugee can grow up to shill for the demagogue bent on keeping desperate refugees like his great-grandfather out.”

Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor to the President for Policy, talks to reporters about President Donald Trump’s support for creating a “merit-based immigration system”, August 2, 2017. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Needless to say, the immigrants Trump wants to keep out of the U.S. are precisely the type who, in Europe, are currently Jew-bashing people like Stephen Miller — and Rob Eshman. But Eshman doesn’t want to think about this ticklish fact, which challenges his own simplistic, self-righteous pontifications. No, better to demonize Miller as “an American Jew [who has] turn[ed] on immigrants,” who has “tak[en] the side of people who… would have met your own great-grandparents at the docks with stones and spitballs,” and who is “stoking anti-immigrant fear and hate, by calling for a ban on an entire religion.”

As it happens, Trump has never sought to enact a ban on an entire religion, although the present situation in Europe certainly makes a good argument for such a ban (with ample room for sensible exceptions, of course).

On August 3, over at the Forward, formerly the Jewish Daily Forward, one Steven Davidson actually served up one of the most idiotic articles of the year, entitled “19 People Jews Should Worry About More Than Linda Sarsour.” Sarsour, of course, is the devout, hijab-wearing, sharia-loving, Israel-boycotting Muslim who, since her high-profile appearance at the Women’s March on the day after Trump’s inauguration, has become a hero of feminism and of the left generally. Linda Sarsour is the very personification of stealth Islamization and an obvious anti-Semite. But as Davidson himself noted, she’s acquired plenty of Jewish allies and defenders, “including Jeremy Ben-Ami, Mark Hetfield, Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Brad Lander.”

As for Davidson, while finding some of her language “coarse and insensitive,” he insists that criticism of her has “no basis in reality.” In his piece, he encouraged readers to move from Sarsour and focus their concerns instead on 19 other people, including Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m capable of hating all these other people while still having enough hate left for Linda Sarsour. (I’m also capable of noticing that nobody in the American mainstream is celebrating most of these other creeps, while Sarsour, under a Hillary Clinton administration, would probably have been in line for a Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Also on the list, however, are White House counter-terrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka, whom Davidson smears as “a member of a far-right group founded by Nazis”; Trump strategist Steve Bannon, formerly of Breitbart, which “spew[s] xenophobic hate”; Milo Yiannopoulos, who although half-Jewish “disseminat[es] Jewish conspiratorial tropes”; and President Trump himself, whose crimes against the Jewish people, according to Davidson, include “[r]efus[al] to mention Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day.” Never mind that he has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren; we are supposed to believe that it is Trump, not Sarsour, who threatens Jews. Perhaps Davidson should have a little chat with some of the growing number of European Jews who are heading straight to Trump’s America to escape Sarsour’s coreligionists who, in countries run by politicians of whom Davidson doubtless approves, are being allowed to turn Europe once again into a place from which Jews feel compelled to flee.

A monograph published late last month of anti-Israel curriculum used in Newton, Mass., public high schoolshas led to revelations of similar materials in circulation at other school districts in the country, the report’s researcher told the Washington Free Beacon on Thursday.

Steven Stotsky of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) said that since the release of his findings in “Indoctrinating Our Youth: How a U.S. Public School Curriculum Skews the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Islam,” he has received phone calls alerting him to disquieting curricula being used in Michigan and California.

“We turned over a rock and discovered a significant problem,” said Stotsky, about his deep dive into textbooks, articles, timelines, and maps used from at least 2011 to 2015—some possibly still in use—for World History course sections on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Islam in Newton’s two public high schools, which are among the most prestigious in the country.

The materials included the Arab World Studies Notebook, a textbook the American Jewish Committee has previously condemned as filled with “factually inaccuracies,” “overt bias,” and “unabashed propagandizing”; a timeline of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that almost entirely omitted instances of Palestinian terrorism; and a misrepresentative translation of the Hamas charter.

Stotsky said procedures must be established for vetting all materials brought into the classroom.

“Teachers are pulling things off the Internet, and a lot of it is fine, but a lot of it not. They can’t just be giving this stuff to students,” said Stotsky.

He questioned the decision to teach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a history class at all.

“History is complicated enough when you are studying issues that are 100, 200 years old,” he said. “You further complicate things when you add current events, and the Israeli-Palestinian issue is still politically and ideologically active.”

Stotsky’s report was the first comprehensive study of these materials, which were only obtained after a years-long battle with Newton administrators by an ad-hoc group of parents and concerned citizens.

Questions about the Newton curriculum were first raised in 2011, but the school district delayed turning over the documents until the summer of 2016. They only complied with those demands after Judicial Watch submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in October 2014, and even then dragged their feet for another two-and-a-half years.

“The obstruction, the failure to respond to citizens’ concerned, the lack of transparency was shocking,” said Stotsky. “The fact that it had to go all the way to a FOIA request is outrageous.”

An easy fix to the transparency issue, said Stotsky, would be simply throwing all curricula up on the Internet as a matter of policy.

Inaccurate, misleading, and radical Israel education is an ongoing problem at area schools, Stotsky said, pointing to a May 2017 “Middle East History Day” program at Newton North High School, at which he described a speaker as giving an “anti-Israel rant” to 150 students.

According to Stotsky, all the members of the Newton School Committee were sent copies of the CAMERA monograph weeks ago, and were asked to respond. Stotsky has been met with silence.

Ruth Goldman, the chair of the Newton School Committee—one of whose roles she said is “transparent communication with parents”—said all of the committee members received the CAMERA monograph and that a few had skimmed through it.

“You have to understand, we receive a lot of materials, and we can’t look through everything. We proactively seek out things that are agenda items for the committee. We don’t take up every thing that comes across our email,” said Goldman.

Goldman also said she couldn’t speak to the details of the case because “all that happened before my time on the committee.” She has served as the committee chair since 2013, a year before the FOIA was first submitted.

“It really had all been taken care of by the time I got here. It’s an old subject at this point,” Goldman said. “We communicate regularly with parents. We have a transparent process at the school committee.”

She wouldn’t speak to specific school curriculum, but said the district adheres to state guidelines and that “history is a tricky subject” taught in a “narrative and critical framework.”

Other school committee members told the Washington Free Beacon that they had not received the monograph and were not familiar with the case.

The mayor of Newton, who also sits on the school committee, was “too busy” to comment.

Aside from the videos, there’s another more troubling aspect to this story, one centering on the gross disparate treatment the mainstream media provides to certain bias crimes. It appears that some hate crimes take precedence over others, depending on which ethnic group is attacked.

[A]nti-Semitic views have seeped into the left. Rancid individuals like Linda Sarsour are portrayed by media outlets like the New York Times as moderate civil rights activists when in fact, they are anything but. Sarsour, Shahin, Harmoush and many others within the Muslim community harbor deep-seated, xenophobic attitudes with particular vitriol reserved toward Jews. The fact that the mainstream media chooses to ignore this unwavering fact should be of concern to all Americans.

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Two disturbing videos have surfaced involving California-based Muslim preachers in which both are heard spewing anti-Semitic vitriol as well as issuing implicit calls for violence against Jews. The videos, which are not dissimilar in content and shrill to those which have emerged from Gaza, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab Mideast, reveal the extent to which anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in large segments of the American Muslim community.

The first video features Egyptian-born preacher Ammar Shahin, who is the imam of the Islamic Center of Davis, northern California. The sermon was delivered on July 21. Shahin, who delivered the sermon in both English and Arabic, is heard invoking an anti-Semitic hadith in which Muslims will do battle with the Jews and the Jews will be forced to take shelter behind rocks and trees. Shahin then says that the trees and rocks will call out to the Muslims and say, “Oh Muslim…come, there is someone behind me – except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.”

Shahin refers to Jews as “filth” and calls on Allah to, “annihilate them down to the very last one; do not spare any of them.” Not content with merely the annihilation of Jewry, Shahin chillingly beseeches Allah to, “make this happen by our hands.” Apparently, a depraved Shahin wants to feel the knife plunging into his victim and derives perverse satisfaction from that feeling.

When confronted with the video, Shahin, who likened Jews to “filth” and called for their “annihilation,” among other sordid gems, alleged that his words were “taken out of context.” It’s funny how Jew-haters always claim to be “taken out of context” once they’re caught. Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour and Keith Ellison, have all resorted to this same tired excuse, once exposed.

The second video, which was also delivered on July 21, features Sheikh Mahmoud Harmoush. The Friday sermon was delivered to congregants at the Islamic Center of Riverside, California.

Harmoush is heard telling his congregants that the immigrant Jews took advantage of Muslim hospitality and conspired to steal the “beautiful land…with killing, crime and massacres.” More ominously, Harmoush invokes “Jihad” and urges his flock to “wake up; it is time to be a Muslim. Prayer is not the only thing.” He further urges them to “resist and fight back” claiming that in addition to “Palestine” the Jews are seeking to seize “most of the Middle East…even Mecca and Medina.” Harmoush completes his screed with the obligatory, “destroy the [Jews] and render them sunder.”

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Harmoush “holds educational and leadership positions at several institutions in Southern California, teaches Arabic at UCLA San Bernardino, and is a member of the leadership council of the Syrian American Council.”

In 2010, Harmoush was embroiled in legal battle involving the expansion of his mosque in Temecula, California. Residents opposed to the expansion cited traffic concerns but others pointed to fears of radicalism and terror. At the time, Harmoush was quoted by the New York Timesstating that accusations of radicalism “really are not worth responding to.”

Clearly, those who opposed the 2010 mosque expansion project had their fears validated by MEMRI’s recent exposé. When interviewed by the New York Times, Harmoush placed his best, moderate foot forward but a radically different and more disquieting picture of Harmoush emerges when he issued an Islamic sermon to a Muslim audience behind closed doors. There, in the safety of secrecy, away from prying eyes and ears, his true feelings poured forth to an approving audience.

Aside from the videos, there’s another more troubling aspect to this story, one centering on the gross disparate treatment the mainstream media provides to certain bias crimes. It appears that some hate crimes take precedence over others, depending on which ethnic group is attacked.

In January and June of 2017 the Islamic Center of Davis was the target of bias crimes. In the first instance, a vandal broke some of the mosque’s windows and placed bacon strips on the mosque’s door handle. In the second instance, an individual dumped cut up pages of the Quran outside the center. Both of these outrages garnered national mainstream media attention and rightfully so. By contrast, the instant shocking revelations involving the anti-Semitic Islamic sermons have garnered scant mainstream media coverage. Thus far, only Jewish and conservative media outlets have given this important matter the coverage it rightly deserves.

The reasons for this are two-fold. First and foremost, both imams originate from Muslim countries – Egypt and Syria – and this type of negative exposure runs counter to the narrative the mainstream media wishes to present. But the sad fact remains that the Muslim community is rife with rabid anti-Semitism. This is hardly surprising given that there is a near 100 percent prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the Arab world.

Second, and perhaps more ominously, anti-Semitic views have seeped into the left. Rancid individuals like Linda Sarsour are portrayed by media outlets like the New York Times as moderate civil rights activists when in fact, they are anything but. Sarsour, Shahin, Harmoush and many others within the Muslim community harbor deep-seated, xenophobic attitudes with particular vitriol reserved toward Jews. The fact that the mainstream media chooses to ignore this unwavering fact should be of concern to all Americans.

Is Hatem Bazian the most dangerous professor in the USA? Nablus-born Bazian, is notorious for calling for intifada [violent uprising] in the United States.

He is the founder of the radical organizations Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). He is a serial pusher of conspiracies, and has a “project” to re-write history. More worryingly, he is largely responsible for the wave of anti-Semitic incitement across North American campuses.

For more info about Bazian, go to this link at the indispensable Canary Mission website. The Canary Mission database was created to document people and groups that are promoting hatred of the U.S., Israel and the Jewish people, particularly on college campuses in North America. You can also learn more about Bazian, SJP and AMP at their comprehensive profile pages at the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks resource site.

Given the Left’s growing animosity toward Israel, it is hardly a surprise that Jared Kushner, the president’s Jewish son-in-law, is someone the Left has firmly in its sights.

Claims of sinister Jewish control of governments used to come from the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Now they seem to be coming from the mainstream Left as well.

And that leads me to conclude that the 45th president of the United States – half German, half Scottish, and so hated by the media and the Left – far from exhibiting any symptoms of anti-Semitism is, in fact, the victim of that oldest of all hatreds.

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Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan earlier this year urged President Trump to “extricate” himself from what he claimed was Jewish influence in the White House, starting with Jared Kushner.

“Ask any Jew, even your son-in-law, America is never first, Israel is always first,” said Farrakhan. “Mr. Trump, you have to extricate yourself from being controlled by any one of these.”

Art Jones, a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier, agrees with Farrakhan and in April spoke at a rally in Kentucky accusing Trump of having betrayed him.

“The white majority are fed up of this Two Party… Jew Party… Queer Party system. Now President Trump; he has surrounded himself with hordes of Jews, including a Jew in his own family…”

But if you thought it was just the crazies who see Trump as having been caught in the nefarious web of “International Jewry,” you would be wrong.

Politico – considered a mainstream news outlet with a strong establishment bias – ran a piece in April suggesting the true source of Russia’s alleged infiltration of the Trump campaign.

I would suggest you read the piece for yourself in full, but save it for a dull rainy day, when you need cheering up (assuming your I.Q. is slightly above that of a mushroom), as it is guaranteed to give you a good laugh.

The piece is titled: “The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin: Where Trump’s Real Estate World Meets a Top Religious Ally of the Kremlin, since there are many types of real estate in the US and Canada; from selling houses to burnaby condos for sale and many other kind of property.

The writer, demonstrating that he may have experimented with certain kinds of mushrooms himself, alleges the whole thing is the fault of…Lubavitch!

Well! I knew that…and also the Hobbits…and Elvis.

And just let me repeat that Politico is a serious media outlet whose journalists are invited to comment on programs like WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show (well, maybe it’s not so serious after all.)

But that led me to thinking: Could the all-out war against Trump by the Left and its media enablers – like The New York Times and the remnant of a once great newspaper called The Washington Post – possibly have anything to do with Trump’s having sent out pro-Jewish and pro-Israel vibes?

The Trump-Russia business is finally coming into clearer, more rational focus. Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, in testimony this week, offered no evidence of Trump campaign cooperation with Russian intelligence.

In fact, despite the desperate efforts of several agencies to find proof, it seems not to be there.

But as Newt Gingrich says, the “Deep State” seems to be determined to bring Trump down at all costs and Russia is the way it thinks it can succeed.

Given the Left’s growing animosity toward Israel, it is hardly a surprise that Jared Kushner, the president’s Jewish son-in-law, is someone the Left has firmly in its sights.

Kushner is as different from his father-in-law as two men can be. One is bawdy, loud, and brash. The other is quiet, intellectual, and refined. One simply cannot stop tweeting and the other has had a Twitter account since 2009 but not used it to issue even one teeny tweet.

Forbes magazine informs us that Donald Trump’s New York office is covered in wall-to-wall memorabilia and tributes to…Donald Trump!

Jared Kushner’s office is three blocks south of Trump Tower. A leather-bound copy of Pirkei Avot sits on a wooden pedestal in the reception room, and identical silver mezuzahs adorn the side of each office door. The only decoration in his large, terraced boardroom is an oil painting of his grandparents, Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II.

Forbes also informs us that Kushner is widely credited for creating the winning formula that got Trump the White House.

No less a Trump foe than the BBC reported early in the Trump presidency that a pattern had been detected in that Trump’s most glaring gaffes occurred over the weekend. That, the BBC explained, is when his son-in-law and daughter were away from the White House because of Shabbat. Other voices, notably that of Trump administration chief strategist Steve Bannon, had the president’s ear then and the tweets betrayed the lack of Jared’s steady and calming influence.

Little wonder that Trump’s many enemies would view it as a smart move to target the person who brings out the best in the president.

So The New York Times, BBC, and the remnant of a once great newspaper called The Washington Post eagerly reported that Jared Kushner was being investigated for possible “collusion” with Russia.

Holman Jenkins commented on this in a June 6 Wall Street Journal piece:

If the Trump campaign directed or cooperated in illegal acts by Russia, that would be collusion in the sense of contributing to a crime.

If Mr. Flynn promised privately what Trump was saying publicly, that he would seek better relations with Russia, as a deliberate inducement to encourage Russian meddling in the race, most of us would consider that an impeachable offense.

But unable to substantiate any such allegation, the media reach for an error so bad it has a name – the equivocation fallacy.

Thus Jared Kushner is accused of,after the election, trying to, “collude” with Russia in settling the Syrian war – the ad absurdum case of trying to make those seven letters c-o-l-l-u-d-e substitute for proof of something nefarious.

Kushner is, in other words, accused of performing the very natural functions of someone on the president’s team, exploring the possibilities of finding common ground with an adversary to defeat a common threat.

I suppose George Washington had people reach out to the British to see if they would concede the war and end the bloodshed. If today’s liberal media had been around back then, that would, in their eyes, have made Washington a British spy.

And since Abraham Lincoln explored ending the Civil War in a letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Lincoln must have been a slaver.

Surely too, today’s New York Times would have branded Woodrow Wilson pro-German for discussing with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George how they could bring the First World War to an end.

At the start of Trump’s presidency, the Left (which naturally means the Jewish Left too, including the Forward and, increasingly, the Anti-Defamation League) allied themselves with the absurd claims that Trump and his adviser Bannon were anti-Semitic.

When the Bannon canard collapsed in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Forward published a piece that exploded the lie. The Forward’s editors, however, did not see fit to apologize for publishing the lie in the first place.

Claims of sinister Jewish control of governments used to come from the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Now they seem to be coming from the mainstream Left as well.

And that leads me to conclude that the 45th president of the United States – half German, half Scottish, and so hated by the media and the Left – far from exhibiting any symptoms of anti-Semitism is, in fact, the victim of that oldest of all hatreds.